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OMG, you guys… My hobby and my career have finally come together to form something SUPER exciting! So I’ve probably mentioned somewhere down the road that I’m a librarian. I guess I’m your typical librarian who loves cardigans, coffee, scarves, a good book, and of course crochet. Not a huge fan of cats, but I’ll pet one every once in a while.

But I am finally going full-blown cliché by starting up my very own crochet club program. Woo woo! I was first intrigued at my last library because we offered a crochet club, and I’ve always wanted to start one here. Welp, now I finally have the time and ambition. So after some heavy name considerations, and trying to choose the perfect, catchy nom de programme (I like to pretend that I still know French…this probably isn’t even grammatically correct) I decided to start up “Off the Hook” Crochet and Knitting Club! It’s a bi-weekly program for crochet and knitting enthusiasts to meet in the library’s Silent Space and work on their project, start a new one, or if you don’t know the first thing about crochet there will *hopefully* be plenty of happy faces to guide you along the way, including myself.

So, if you’re one of my Off the Hook members reading this, HELLO! I can’t wait to get started on October 7 and finally crochet at work without it being frowned upon. Yeeeeaaaaaaah!

Let me tell you about my friends Angie and Nick.. They have the 2nd cutest, loudest Beagle I’ve ever met, and now 2 handsome little men running around their home. Angie just had her second boy a few weeks back so of course I had to crochet him something. Nick is a Union man to the bone, and his (made in America) work boots are one of the most important tools of the trade. I figured I’d give baby Luke a pair just like his daddy. How adorable are these?

I should make something for their first born again.. I was just learning to crochet when she had him so he got a funny looking hat that was too small to begin with… hmmm..

P.S. All is well in Texas =) I just put my mom back on a flight to Chicago this morning after a 4 day visit. She soaked up the sun and palm trees around Houston and on Galveston, and actually got to see me do work at my Spring Book Club discussion of Kathleen Kent’s novel The Outcasts. It’s really good, go read it.

I’m a little depressed about the lack of snowflakes down here. I figured I would be the happiest person on Earth to have a Winter without snow.

Wrong.

Surprisingly, I’m kind of sad I won’t have any snow. I love to see it falling from the sky! I turn into a little kid and say “ooooooooooooooooo.” It’s pretty when it first comes down, but then the day after a snowfall when it turns all gray and mushy, I’m all “Go home, snow, you’re ugly.”

Anyway, I’m trying to put together a Think Tank installation at the library to replace my current “Letters to Santa” room. Matt, Dixie and I are going home to Chicago on Saturday (hey, I might see some snow!) and won’t be here to disassemble the letters to Santa room after Christmas. I figured why not bring some snow to Texas! I’ve started prepping a Snowflake Creation Station that a co-worker can toss in there until I get back =D. Not everyone knows how to make paper snowflakes, so I want to have simple instructions easy enough for anyone to follow. Who would have thought it would be nearly impossible to find simple, drawn instructions on how to make paper snowflakes?! I got fed up, and did what any good DIY’er would do.. Made my own.

So, here’s a PDF of my instructions which I drew out in Photoshop. Don’t hate on my artistic ability. I ran it by a few fellow librarians and the instructions seem comprehensive enough. Feel free to use them to your heart’s content! All I ask is that you let me know how your snowflakes turn out!

Book Bird has now been dubbed “Word Bird” at the library! We’ll be rolling him out later this week or early next week. And he even spawned a new pal. I enjoyed making Word Bird so much that I decided to go ahead and make a little green bird to place for sale on my store! Check them out…..

I posted a couple years ago about connecting literature with crochet. I made a funny looking spider from a children’s picture book for a friend’s daughter and he turned out awesome. I now have another chance to merge my crochet skillz with my library profession once again because I’m an over achiever.

The idea was sparked when a little girl left her Hello Kitty toy hanging out on a statue we have in the library. The statue is of a little boy reading a book, and the way she abandoned it there, nuzzled next to the little boy, it looked like Hello Kitty was sucked into whatever bronze book the boy has been reading for the last 20 years. Then it gave my boss an idea… What if we had our own “mascot” for the library, and what if it traveled to a new spot every day, waiting for a kid to find it?? Genius. So the plan is it to hide it in a new spot every day and whenever a kid finds it they’ll get a sticker or some little toy to leave under the seat in their mom’s mini van.

The over achiever in me decided I was going to crochet this little mascot because I haven’t made anything in a while and my fingers are losing that crochet hook tone (yes, crochet muscles!) So here I go, working on a little blue bird to flutter around the library!

I promise he will be something soon… And the children will love him! Or they’ll just love the stickers and bookmarks they’ll get when they find him hiding in the library…. Tweet Tweet!

Woof. Have I got some news for you.. A lot has been happening in my life these last couple months. I’ve made some huge life decisions which have been panning out fairly well so far. Some people are happy staying on a streamlined path in life and going in the direction of mundane.. But my life has veered in a strange direction that brought me to a whole new world…. This Yankee has moved down South to the great country of Texas! That’s right. On March 30th I packed everything into my little coupe and moved myself 1,000 miles away from home. 1,106 miles to be exact.

So far, everything is turning out beyond great for Matt and I. We both landed excellent jobs making more money than either one of us has ever seen. We’re settled in a good sized trailer with an abundance of land to grow a summer harvest of veggies and herbs, and possibly soon, have a fur-ever friend runing around in the back yard. I’d say we’re happy for now and still figuring out how to live with each other — which is turning out to be a little too easy, as a matter of fact.

The weather is beautiful (for now) and the summer will take some getting used to. Especially the fact that we’re pretty much living in a vacation spot being so close to Galveston Island. Our simple lives are consisting of work, evenings on the front porch with dinner and an after-work ta-ta, weekends getting ourselves more settled in and figuring out this new life, and phone calls and texts home to let everyone know we’re still hanging in there!

I’ve been neglectful of keeping this updated and I always dreamed that one day when I made my own adventure and moved far far away I would document every step of the way, sharing every scene and moment with everyone buuuut that simply didn’t happen. There are dozens of pictures on my phone that haven’t been uploaded, and a big gap in posts on this blog. I said in one of my very first posts that I would make this blog an even balance of crochet and my life, but it’s all moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up with! So once again, here is a [hopefully not empty] promise I will make to share my Texas adventures on here every chance I get!

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Jennanana

Hello, all! I am a twenty-something librarian, thrifter, crafter, beer drinker, photographer, and of course crochet hooker who recently took up residence in Houston, Texas. I blog because I make fun things out of yarn and I want to share those fun things with new friends. I was inspired to share my nifty things with the world, so hopefully this does the same for at least one other person =)